Advanced Life Created in Two Ancient Explosions

by Dave Mosher | January 03, 2008 09:00am ET

A 565-million-year-old fossil from Newfoundland, Canada known as Fractofusus andersoni. This Ediacaran creature is among the earliest of the period and may have evolved following an "explosion" in biodiversity about 575 million years ago - 33 million years before the larger, better-known Cambrian explosion.Credit: Bing Shen, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Complex life on Earth may have blossomed during two "explosions," not one, a new study suggests.

Earth's biggest species diversification occurred 542 million years ago, during what's called the Cambrian explosion. But a similar and rapid burst in evolution occurred 33 million years prior, researchers now think. They've dubbed the event the Avalon explosion.

“It now appears that at the dawn of the macroscopic life, between 575 and 520 million years ago, there was not one, but at least two major episodes of abrupt morphological expansion," said Shuhai Xiao, a paleontologist at Virginia Tech.

The new study, detailed in the Jan. 4 issue of the journal Science, examines life during Ediacaran Period on Earth, between 635 million years and 542 million years ago. The authors compared 200 different species to reveal that their body types — and richness of diversity — appeared at around the same time.

Despite the first boost in diversity, however, the Ediacaran creatures all but vanished before the Cambrian explosion that followed.

"The Avalon explosion represents an independent, failed experiment with an evolutionary pattern similar to that of the Cambrian explosion," the authors said.

Dave Mosher

Dave Mosher, currently the online director at Popular Science, writes about everything in the science and technology realm, including NASA's robotic spaceflight programs and wacky physics mysteries. He has written for several news outlets in addition to Live Science and Space.com, including: Wired.com, National Geographic News, Scientific American, Simons Foundation and Discover Magazine. When not crafting science-y sentences, Dave dabbles in photography, bikes New York City streets, wrestles with his dog and runs science experiments with his nieces and nephews.